Christ’s Weeping Over Jerusalem (1)

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation (Luke 19:41-44). 

A reader asks, “How do some people try to use this text to say that God weeps over the destruction of the reprobate?”

A similar passage is found in Matthew 23:37: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” The biblical key to the right interpretation of this text is to note—as did Augustine—the distinction it makes between “Jerusalem” (whose religious leaders were the unbelieving Pharisees) and Jerusalem’s “children” (the true, spiritual, elect Jews) whom Jesus desired to, and did, save. For more on this, see “Christ’s Will to Gather Jerusalem’s Children” (CR News X:3-5;www.cprf.co.uk/crnews.htm).

Both texts are wrongly cited as proof for the notion that the gospel is a gracious expression of God’s love for all men and of His desire to save all men, including the reprobate. It is so adamantly promoted by its proponents that anyone who disagrees is the object of some nasty name-calling: “Hyper-Calvinists! Unable to do evangelism!”

The argument that finds a gracious and well-meant gospel offer in these texts is this: If Jesus was sorrowful at the impending judgment of Jerusalem, which would leave Jerusalem lying in heaps of rubble, His sorrow must have been born in His desire to save the inhabitants—and His failure to do so. He was stymied in His desires and failed to accomplish His purpose in spite of His best efforts. Thus some, claiming to be Calvinists and claiming, therefore, that God always accomplishes His purpose, have no other recourse available to them than to conclude that a sovereign God failed to save those whom He loves and desires to save. No appeal to “apparent contradiction” or “higher logic in God than in us” can escape the conclusion that our Lord was bitterly disappointed that His best efforts to save Jerusalem were stymied by Jerusalem’s unbelief.

It has also been argued that Christ according to His divine nature willed and desired the salvation of the elect only but that according to His human nature He desired the salvation of all men. This interpretation was offered in a rather well-known church case in Australia. But the one who taught this view was rightly charged with Nestorianism, that is, the error, condemned already by the church at the Council of Ephesus in 431, that our Lord had two persons. When this heresy of Nestorianism is applied to the gracious and well-meant gospel offer, the result is confusion. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is personally the Second Person of the Trinity, and who is (to use the words of the Nicene Creed) “true God of true God,” was fully sovereign in all that He did, especially in His salvation of the elect for whom He died. But that same Lord Jesus Christ was also a human person who earnestly desired the salvation of all men and in love and mercy for all sought their salvation. Our one Lord Jesus Christ living in a state of constant contradiction! How can that be?

But Scripture does not teach such “paradoxes” and “apparent contradictions,” and those who claim that it does do so only because they have an axe to grind: they want to spread abroad the notion that God loves all men and would save them all if He could.

The reason for our Lord’s sorrow is relatively easy. Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. Israel was the one people that God had chosen to be His own possession and to whom He had given special gifts (cf. Rom. 9:4-5). Furthermore, Jerusalem was filled with pictures of Christ Himself: the throne of David and Solomon, the temple, the many sacrifices that were made daily in the temple, the feasts celebrated in the holy city and Mount Zion itself, beautiful for situation and the joy of the whole earth (Ps. 48:2). All these pictures had served a very good purpose throughout the entire old dispensation.

That these beautiful pictures of Christ were marred badly by the wicked scribes and Pharisees was the reason for Christ’s sorrow. Is not this understandable? Would you not be grieved if some wicked person took your best photograph and spoiled it so terribly that you looked like a monster? Would you not be very sorrowful if someone painted a beard on a photograph of your mother?

Christ was like us in all things, sin excepted. He was also a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, who could weep over the death of his beloved Lazarus—even though He knew He was going to raise Lazarus from the grave.

The pictures were hopelessly ruined, with no chance of proper restoration. Our Lord could see Jerusalem in all its splendour as it pointed to Himself. He was saddened by what was about to happen to it. 

But He was also angry. When He saw the temple, a picture of His own blessed body, made a den of thieves, He was infuriated. In His anger, He drove out the buyers and sellers and the animals that were sold within its precincts (John 2:13-22). 

It certainly is not strange that Christ, Himself true God of true God, was grieved at the sin that made Jerusalem the ugly spectacle that it had become. God certainly was grieved with Israel when they constantly rebelled against Him in the wilderness (Heb. 3:10, 17; Ps. 95:10). Surely, there is no one who would dare to say that God delights in the sin of man, much less His own people. Surely, no one would hold to the position that God is filled with joy when the church corrupts His truth and makes a caricature of His sovereignty. The very idea is blasphemous.

But to conclude from God’s anger with sinners and His abhorrence of sin that He desires to save all men is a monstrous corruption of simple logic. The truth of Scripture is that God loves His elect with a love revealed in the cross of Christ and God so greatly abhors the sinner that He punishes the sinner with eternity in hell.